text:
- John Joseph Adams wrote a nice piece for SciFi Wire about Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's guest editing of Best American Fantasy.
- Speaking of Best Americans, all the various ones from various publishers now seem to be out in stores. I stayed up much too late last night, utterly engrossed in The Best American Essays 2007, guest edited by David Foster Wallace. I always find a few essays in that book to be fascinating or impressive, but none of the other volumes I've read have so completely hooked me -- indeed, in all the other volumes I've encountered at least one essay that cured insomnia. That's not the case with this edition. I was reading the first essay, Jo Ann Beard's "Werner", last night at a pizza place across from Cooper Union, and I not only nearly missed the Jonathan Lethem event because the piece was so gripping, but it was a struggle not to burst into tears at the end of it. Breathtaking. As are so many of the other essays.
- I am doing everything I can not to run out and buy a copy of Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. The good people at McNally Robinson can attest to my immense powers of self-control. They watched as I struggled with the Mr. Hyde that kept pushing me toward it, toward it, toward it... People emailing to say how much they're enjoying it and how brilliant it is do not help the cause. I actually petted a friend's copy of it when we went out to see the play Have You Seen Steve Steven?. Even though it's a heavy book, she is addicted to it and carries it around with her wherever she goes. Actually, I think she does this to torture people like me, who lack the time to tackle a gazillion-page tome of brilliance right now. What else would explain her putting the book on the table at the bar we went to? In the middle of the table? Why why why do my friends insist on tormenting me?!?
- How was the play? Entertaining, generally well acted and directed, but the script (an amalgamation of Albee and Ionesco) falls apart in the last third, as if the writer didn't really know what to do with her set-up and threw her hands in the air and said, "Well, whatever!" I liked what was going on in the end more than what was going on in the beginning -- a bit too much of a familiar "aren't people in the mid-west funny?" and "isn't middle-class suburban life suffocating?" attempt at satire, despite some marvelous lines -- so it would have been nice if the script actually created a context for the absurdity of words divorced from meanings to be more, well, meaningful (the play becomes a game of ping-pong with free-floating signifiers). The end is amusing enough in its oddity, but there's no weight to it. It's strange, but not estranging. Nonetheless, watching the play was not at all a boring or tedious experience, and 13P is a really great venture, one I hope to continue to follow.
- Finally, as Woody Allen once said, "In summing up, I wish I had some kind of affirmative message to leave you with. I don't. Would you take two negative messages?"
28 September 2007
A Few Quick Notes
27 September 2007
A Report from the Lethem-PKD Event
- Martian Time-Slip
- Dr. Bloodmoney
- Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
- A Scanner Darkly
- Now Wait for Last Year
To a question about why, when other writers also write about paranoia and such, Dick is so special, Lethem replied that when he speaks of Dick, he often also finds himself (or other people) bringing up Pynchon, DeLillo, and Vonnegut, among others, but that for him the difference is a matter of distance and emotional reserve -- Dick's difference is defined by his emotional investment in the situations. His empathy is his only compass. He possessed an obvious satirical impulse (or worldview, even), but he doesn't make fun of his characters' situations. He seems to grapple with the world and seek for solace.
Lethem had mentioned early on that one of the things he found most interesting and challenging about putting together the first LOA volume was working on the timeline, where 40 years of disappointments and struggles were not buffered by a biographical narrative, but were, instead, tied to particular dates. An audience member asked him to elaborate on this, and on the timeline's effect on his story "Phil in the Marketplace". He got a bit off topic and talked for a while about Hampton Fancher, who wrote the first version of the script of Blade Runner, mostly as a way to explain that it seemed Dick was deeply uncomfortable with his growing fame, and feared the encroaching outer world as much as he desired it. Who knows, for instance, how uncomfortable he might be with the kind of canonization he's recently received? Yet he would also, hopefully, be hugely gratified. "Phil in the Marketplace" is about his exile temperament -- he wrote from the margin and drew energy from what he saw as the fate of the pulp writer. Lethem said he wants, and has wanted since he was young, what every PKD fan vociferously wants -- legitimacy for Dick. And yet he noted that he and many fans also have another side, one that no matter what sort of accolades or canonization Dick receives, still feels slighted, denied, defiant. But, Lethem noted, Dick is now in the Library of America, and nobody can remove him.
The next question referred to I Am Alive and You Are Dead, and the questioner asked if Lethem thought Dick was ever really in control. Lethem said he admired that book, but thought it played to the Romantic view of Dick as a crazy artist, and that we have to remember that he had other sides to his life and personality, and that he also really enjoyed wearing masks (playing a role) and being a raconteur. He loved to create theories, test them, and test the credibility (and gullibility) of his audience with them. He didn't stand on one patch of ground. It's as hopeless, Lethem said, to defend him against the word "crazy" as it is to defend Faulkner against the word "alcoholic", but we also have to recognize how generally functional Dick was, and how much more to him there is than just the crazy stuff.
Another questioner asked if he liked Dick's Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Lethem said he did, and he thought it was, as Dick's last completed novel, a very encouraging place for his career to end up, because it's a sensitively-written novel told from a woman's point of view -- and if you're going to have trouble with any element of Dick's writing, Lethem said, you're going to have trouble with the female characters in many of his books, because they are often treated as [I think this is the term he used, but had some trouble hearing it:] dark lords. Dick wrote 40+ novels, Lethem said, and on any day at least 8-10 of them seem to him to be among PKD's best, and Transmigration is up there.
He then made a point I think is insightful -- that you have to read at least 3 Dick novels, preferably in different modes, to really understand his accomplishment. (I should have raised my hand and asked him to elaborate on this, but he's probably done so in an essay or interview somewhere.)
Finally, someone asked what Lethem thought of the movies made from Dick's writings. He said two or three are worthwhile. Blade Runner he said he hated when he first saw it, because of its huge divergences from the original novel, but that later, and particularly with the director's cut, he decided it was one of the great American movies, something any PKD fan could be grateful for the way a Hemingway fan, for instance, could be grateful that something by Hemingway inspired a movie as great as To Have and Have Not [the obvious difference being, though, that that great movie -- with a script that William Faulkner, among others, worked on -- was based on one of Hemingway's lesser novels, whereas Blade Runner was based on one of Dick's best]. Lethem said he liked A Scanner Darkly, though it certainly shows some of the limits of adaptation. Of the other films, he said there are some scenes that he likes very much, and wished he could put together a movie just from some of those. He said we can be grateful that most of the movies based on Dick's writings have been made from the short stories, leaving the major works for future Richard Linklaters. Or so we can hope.
25 September 2007
JL on PKD at CU
Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
Lecture and book signing
Thursday, September 27, 6:30 pm
The Great Hall
7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
Acclaimed writer Jonathan Lethem is the editor of a selection of novels written by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick from the 1960s. Dick left behind more than 160 short stories and novels when he died in 1982. Many of his tales have become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report. Lethem bundled four of Dick's novels into one book to give a new generation the opportunity to discover Dick's futuristic visions.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Gun, with Occasional Music; The Fortress of Solitude and You Don't Love Me Yet. Motherless Brooklyn, his fifth, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
24 September 2007
New Strange Horizons
Ice's plot doesn't so much progress as spiral inwards, tightening in on the moment in which the encroaching ice leaves only the narrator and the woman alone in the world. Even this point of convergence, however, isn't the novel's purpose -- indeed, the story ends ambivalently, holding out the possibility of yet more iterations of the narrator's story to come. Ice is an exercise in sustaining an emotional tone -- an oppressive, terrifying, senseless one. It succeeds at this task admirably, making for a reading experience that is not so much pleasant as irresistible, and an emotional impact that proves very difficult to shake off.(For another view of Ice, see L. Timmel Duchamp's essay from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.)
Also in this issue of Strange Horizons is my latest column. This one is about Guy Davenport's story "Belinda's World Tour" (available in A Table of Green Fields and The Death of Picasso). The column is a sort of companion piece to my previous one, continuing to look at the representation of historical figures in fiction.
21 September 2007
Random Thoughts on Things Recently Read and Soon to Be Read
In putting together a list of books I'm hoping to read, or finish reading, soon, I realized there are a handful of books I've read and not written about. I'll start this rather random and rambling (and staggeringly opinionated!) post, then, with a few of those.
I don't often finish reading books I don't like. Undoubtedly, this tendency has caused me to miss books I would, eventually, have found fascinating, but I can think of very few books that I have disliked during the first 100 pages that have, later, proved rewarding. Resentment ruins the experience of reading, and once I have built up resentment of a book for wasting my time, I'm unlikely to be able to notice its virtues as I continue reading.
Nonetheless, I somehow managed to read three books recently that I quite vehemently disliked from pretty early on, and yet I finished them. The books were The Exception by Christian Jungersen, Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward, and The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson. I disliked them all for similar reasons, and I'm trying to pin down my feelings so as to write an essay, because what bothered me was each book's use of violence as a way of manipulating the reader's sympathies or judgment. The first two books seem well-intentioned but tasteless and crude, the Thomson more interesting in the structural and narrative gambles it makes, though ultimately I wasn't able to discover any meaningful purpose to those gambles, so the whole thing seemed merely absurd, and if the sentences weren't so plain the novel might have caused me to giggle throughout. (I loved Thomson's Divided Kingdom, and just wrote a review [probably for Rain Taxi] of his new novel, Death of a Murderer, which I had mixed but not terribly negative feelings about.)
After The Exception and Forgive Me, I knew I wanted to try to write something about why those two books seemed to me to reduce atrocities to kitsch, and so I began to seek out novels that might offer more thoughtful approaches to the presentation of terrible violence in fiction. This led me to Gillian Slovo's novel Red Dust, which I'd just watched the movie of. While the movie is better than the oddly similar but less engaging In My Country (both are about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission), it turned out to be a real lessening of the book, because the book's strength is its even-handed presentation of very different characters' points of view. While this is no great innovation for a novel, the differences between the movie of Red Dust and the book show why, for this material, it's an excellent choice. The floating viewpoints of the novel are lost in the movie, which puts most of its emphasis on Hilary Swank's character while still trying to maintain the novel's moral complexities. Reading the book shows how significantly the movie fails at that.
Red Dust makes for a good comparison with The Exception, where multiple points of view are a gimmick that never brings us beyond the fact that Jungersen's novel sets us up to equate obnoxious office workers with the victims of genocide. The Exception obviously and monotonously yells the theme of "we are all capable of atrocities"; Red Dust lets characters and events suggest complexities and ambiguities, but the presentation is generally without the schematic moralizing or melodrama that fills every chapter of The Exception. Red Dust is superior to Forgive Me, too, on a number of levels -- the prose and dialogue don't gleam with superficial polish or sag with ponderous attention to the obvious, the characters are less stereotypical, and the difficulties of South Africa's post-apartheid years are not an excuse for the protagonist to discover great truths about herself or decide that being an independent, adventurous woman is less appealing than being a dull mom in Nantucket.
I'm now reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, a tremendously engrossing novel about which I'm sure I will soon have a lot more to say. [Update 11/6/07: Alas, I found that after an engrossing start, Half of a Yellow Sun didn't really hold up for me, and though I got halfway through, I didn't end up finishing it.]
Somewhere in the last month or so I read Tobias Wolff's Old School, which disappointed me, especially because I have liked many of Wolff's previous books. But Old School hardly left any impression on me -- I really can't remember much of anything from it.
I haven't finished many books I've been intending to finish for some time, including Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space and the collection of recent Caine Prize winners, Jungfrau and Other Short Stories. I seldom read short story collections straight through; instead I dip in, come up for air, dip again ... later... I've just started dipping into two collections of Ryunosake Akutagawa's stories, Rashomon and Other Stories and Mandarins. Much of this is Jeffrey Ford's fault, because ever since I read Jeff's essay on "Hell Screen", I've wanted to read it. (And he's right; it's worth it. The story is in the Penguin collection.) It's also Dustin Kurtz's fault, since he recommended Mandarins at the McNally Robinson site, and when I saw a copy sitting on the Archipelago Books table at the Brooklyn Book Festival, I couldn't resist it. The collections complement each other well in their selections (there's very little overlap), and both are quite beautiful paperbacks. The stories are extraordinary -- the title story of Mandarins reminds me of (and is as good as) Chekhov's best early stories.
Finally, some books I hope soon to read or finish reading: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, Design Flaws of the Human Condition by Paul Schmidtberger, The Changeling by Kate Horsley, Auralia's Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet, From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Hettie Jones, Foreigners by Caryl Phillips, The Assassin's Song by M.G. Vassanji ... and many more...
20 September 2007
Literate Nobodies
I often remind my students that, despite their belief that they have important knowledge to communicate to the world at large through their poetry, their status as poets already suggests that they have failed to make any momentous discovery that might have otherwise contributed to the history of knowledge; otherwise, the students might have exploited this insight in far more lucrative vocations, like the sciences or even business. I remind my students that they are probably taking my class in poetry because "math is hard"--and since they have no other worthy skills, they have chosen to accept their demotion to a lowly caste of literate nobodies. I get a few nervous giggles from the students after these waggish tirades--but then I underline my argument by saying that, if students really do believe that they are communicating, heretofore undiscovered, revelations to the public, then the proper genre for transmitting such a discovery is definitely not a poem, but a press conference....
16 September 2007
Brooklyn Book Festival
We also got to meet Tom Roberge of A Public Space, another person I'd exchanged plenty of emails with, but had not yet encountered in person. I convinced Tempest to subscribe, which was one of my better accomplishments of the day. There are only a few magazines I really wouldn't want to be without for even one issue, and A Public Space is one such magazine.
Gavin Grant and Jed Berry manfully manned the Small Beer Press table. Tempest and I had discussed the fact that there haven't been any good, physical literary fights recently -- plenty of internet flamewars and such, but nobody actually punching somebody out -- and so we tried to convince Gavin that he should start such a fight, perhaps at the upcoming World Fantasy Convention, but he didn't like the idea, citing certain impracticalities and long-range effects. (Why do people have to be sensible and ruin our grand plans for entertainment?)
I tried to find Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press to catch up with him, since we haven't had a chance to chat for a while, but he was off watching some hockey game or something involving steel. I thought for a while that this was just a ploy to get me to go away and stop scaring customers away from the Soft Skull table, but Ed got the same info.
(Except I never saw Ed. Sure, there were 10,000 people at the festival, but still. If anybody can stand out amidst 10,000 people, it's Ed. I think one of us doesn't exist. Actually, during the entire day the only litblogger I encountered was Levi Asher. I think they were all hiding from me. Or wearing disguises. After all, it took me a moment to recognize Levi...)
Tempest and I had lunch at a wonderful place serving wraps and smoothies, a bunch of blocks away from the festival, down some roads. (Brooklyn remains a mystery to me.) We had many fun moments during lunch, but one particularly fun one for me was watching somebody reading today's Times, utterly engrossed by Maria Headley's amusing and touching essay about being a stepmonster. I restrained myself from going up to the poor, unwitting soul and screaming like a little girl, "Hey, I know her! She's great! Omygawd you're reading her essay!!!" It took a lot of self-denial and inner strength to avoid doing this, but I somehow persevered.
The only panel/reading we went to was a reading by Uzodinma Iweala, Doreen Baingana, and Mohammed Naseehu Ali, all of whom were excellent. I knew Iweala's and Baingana's work, but Ali was new to me, and I will now most certainly seek out his collection The Prophet of Zongo Street. Doreen Baingana, who I first became acquainted with in Kenya last year, read part of a story from her excellent collection Tropical Fish, and Iweala read a story from the latest Paris Review. (And I guess here is the place where I have to admit I don't read The Paris Review much anymore because it has become so thin. A few stories, an interview or two, a handful of poems, some pictures. The design has gotten better, but the contents have been put on such a diet the magazine just doesn't hold much interest for me anymore. Alas.)
There were other panels that looked fascinating, but there were long lines to get tickets to see them, and getting tickets would have required planning and organization on my part. So we only saw the one. And a good one it was.
After the reading, I found Tom Burke, who is one of the organizers of the Summer Literary Seminars program through which I visited Kenya last year. Tom kindly introduced me to some of the people behind one of my favorite websites, Words Without Borders, and pointed out a new lit mag to me, the St. Petersburg Review, which is published from my home state of New Hampshire and features a bunch of excellent writers, including George Saunders, Gina Ochsner, Padgett Powell, Josip Novakovich, Aimee Bender, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Mark Halperin, Timothy Liu, and, appropriately, many Russians whose names are at the moment unfamiliar to me. It also includes a special section of poetry by women from the Gulags.
By the end of the day, I was too tired to make the trek over to the Sunday Salon, so that's going to have to wait for another Sunday. It's good to have things to look forward to.
13 September 2007
VanderBooks Massive Blowout Sale!
Brooklyn Book Fest and Sunday Salon
If I've still got some energy and a few wits about me by evening, I'll be going to the Sunday Salon at 7pm at the Stain Bar, if I can find it (I tend to get bewildered in Brooklyn).
10 September 2007
The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
Like a patchwork quilt, Nalo Hopkinson's new novel The New Moon's Arms positively seethes with patterns and threads that clash, but come together regardless. It's a madcap comic novel about aging, the wounds of slavery, and the transformative power of love set on an imaginary archipelago in the Caribbean.
The action centers around Calamity Lambkin, a curmudgeonly 50-something woman on the verge of menopause. Her first person narration is raunchy and rollicking without resorting to the cheap sassiness that Hollywood assigns black women. You won't find Calamity in a Tyler Perry movie anytime soon. Born Chastity, she has renamed herself Calamity after a life of hardship, involving a teenaged pregnancy, single motherhood and the disappearance of her own mother. During her father's funeral, she starts experiencing intense hot flashes that coincide with her finding objects that have been lost long ago—mostly from her childhood. A monogrammed pin, a toy truck, and in one instance, her father's entire cashew grove appears out of thin air. During a particularly violent storm, Calamity finds the strangest thing of all: a lost child who has washed up on shore, who babbles an incomprehensible language. She decides to act as a foster parent to the lost boy, which causes further complications in her life.
Calamity is a profoundly flawed character, but one whose heart is in the right place. She is deeply suspicious, has a mean streak as wide as the Sargasso, and makes alienating mistakes at the drop of a hat. The little lost boy brings out her vulnerability, even as she drives potential friends, lovers and her own child away. Her hard-headedness, though, is what drives her quest to find the lost boy's parents.
Folklore is woven into the structure of the novel that informs the narrative. An ancestor of Calamity's, referred to the Dada Hair Woman, has several interludes set during the harrowing Middle Passage. Like Calamity, she is a 'finder' whose power is triggered by her menstrual cycles. This section is told in a mythic tone different from the rest of the novel, and readers will find echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved; like Morrison, Hopkinson is able to make scenes of unflinching brutality ultimately cathartic. Another folkloric strain concerns 'the devil girl of the sea, that mirrors the action of the main story:
'Keep your part of the bargain now,' said the devil girl. 'Pull me out of this hole.'Hopkinson's archipelago of Cayaba is rich with history and contemporary touches. It's a culturally diverse setting where a salt-mining plant competes with family salt farms; where old beliefs compete with new ones (Calamity's daughter is a new age hippy, much to her mother's chagrin). 'Jumbies' and internet connectivity exist side by side. The struggles of the indigenous postcolonial population against corporate-driven political maneuvering is another theme explored here.
So Granny did that. The devil girl was slippery. Her skin was a deep blue, like the water in Blue Pit, the bottomless lagoon. And she was heavy for so! Granny managed, though. But before Granny could stop her, the devil girl shimmied up onto Granny's shoulders, wrapped her legs around Granny's neck, and tangled her long blue nails in Granny's hair. 'Carry me to where you living, Granny; beg you do,' said the devil girl.
And she squeezed her legs tighter around Granny's neck.
Hopkinson threatens to move into didactic territory when she adds a queer subplot. While admirable, it distracts from the main narrative thrust. Calamity's got pregnant with her daughter by her gay best friend, and one of her current love interests is bisexual. Calamity reacts with anger at these perceived betrayals and gets soundly slapped down by people with more enlightened attitudes. These scenes come across stiffly and have an educational feel.
The New Moon's Arms is mostly a fun novel. There were moments when I was reading it on DC's Metro that I laughed aloud, and elicited strange looks from fellow passengers. It's not every day you can call a postcolonial novel a 'feel-good' book.
07 September 2007
Tachyon's Superluminal Velocity
Recently, I've been continually impressed by Tachyon Publications, and I realized I haven't really said much here about Tachyon -- in many ways, I've just taken them for granted. Taking them for granted is a terrible thing to do, though, especially since they have a particular commitment to short story collections and anthologies, the sort of books that bigger publishers often consider anathema, but that devoted readers (like all of us, of course!) feast upon. (Mmmm, good paper, tasty book...)
I was looking around for some information on Jim Kelly and John Kessel's upcoming book, Re-wired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and I saw an offer from way back in May on the Tachyon blog for free shipping in the U.S. on all pre-orders (the book will be published in October). I wondered if the deal was still good, so I contacted Jill Roberts, and she said, indeed, it is -- for all forthcoming books, not just Re-wired. Just email Jill. (It may not apply to Shatterday and The Dog Said Bow-Wow, since those were just released a few days ago.)
Much of what is upcoming is pretty spectacular -- take a look at the just-announced spring list: the VanderMeers' steampunk anthology, a new novel by Thomas M. Disch, Year's Best Fantasy 8, a new Nancy Kress thriller, and a reprint of Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard.
I'm very curious about Tachyon's past and future, and so am preparing an interview with Jill, who is managing editor, and with Jacob Weisman, who is publisher and editor-in-chief. Cheryl Morgan published an interview with Jacob almost exactly three years ago, and it will be interesting to see what has changed and what hasn't in that time.
05 September 2007
The Moral Argument of Talking Dogs
His puffed-up preferences are not moral imperatives.
I happen to disagree with Wood, but in invoking moral objections he's already denied me equal textual footing for a rebuttal. Certain metatextual questions remain in play: We can talk, for example, about whether or not Robert Lowell should have incorporated his ex-wife's letters into his work, but I fear I'm not willing or able to sustain a moral argument for or against Pynchon's decision to include a talking dog and a mechanical duck in Mason & Dixon rather than more conventional, rounded human characters. To engage a moral argument about such things is to be led down the primrose path by Wood, where we will engage in narrowing the novel instead of celebrating its manifold possibilities.
04 September 2007
The Price of Books
As Mark points out, in comparison to going out to see a movie, buying a book is not a horrendously expensive activity. And in comparison to going to the theatre, it's downright cheap.
But, as Colleen can attest, I had a strong reaction when I grabbed the new Best American Poetry, a wee 192 pages, and saw the price was $16. It went right back onto the table from which I picked it up. I haven't bought a BAP since Lyn Heijinian's 2004 volume, which was also $16 (for 288 pages), but I ordered that one online and for a sharp discount, which is probably what I'll do for the new edition (the editor, Heather McHugh, is a poet I like quite a bit -- I buy BAPs for the guest editors, not the contents, really).
Later, I asked myself what price I would have been willing to pay for the book, and thought that probably $13.95 was about the threshold between, "Wow, a book!" and "Wow, that price!" If the new BAP had been priced at that, I would have left the store with it.
In some ways, this makes little sense -- $13.95 is only $2.05 less than the actual price, and $2.05, particularly here in the region of NYC, ain't a lot of money. But there is a psychological barrier -- $16 feels like a rip-off for a 192-page paperback, even though I don't make it a practice of buying books based on weight.
Interestingly, the list price for The Best American Poetry 1999 is $17.95, which in 2007 dollars would be about $22.44, so the price of the books has gone down over the years. Really, though, the lesson here is patience: that 1999 edition is available used for $0.01 (plus shipping) from Amazon.
Fall Quarterly Conversation
03 September 2007
Description and Its Discontents
But we knew the book was pretty weird, and not likely to appeal to certain types of readers. I was curious how readers for whom it was not a perfect experience reacted. Soon enough, we heard from a couple of folks who didn't really like the book on the whole, and couldn't connect to, seemingly, any of the stories. These responses were in private, because we asked anybody who even hinted that they had reservations about the book to tell us why -- we were curious to understand how people could not share in our enthusiasm for these stories, and hoped we might learn something from the responses. Not liking a few stories was completely understandable (that's the nature of an anthology), but not liking most of them was, perhaps naively, almost inconceivable to us. Sure, "The Chinese Boy" and "The End of Narrative" are difficult, dense pieces that are not going to win mass audiences, but surely no-one would fail to be wowed by "Bit Forgive". And even if someone thought we were tending toward the "literary" and ... whatever ... at least they'd have the longest story in the book, "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" (a high school zombie romp), as relief. We spent a lot of time working on the order of the stories, and paid particular attention to the first few, wanting to demonstrate the variety available in the book and also wanting to reassure readers who didn't connect to one story that, with the next, they'd get something quite different.
Thankfully, there have been very few people so far who have disliked the whole thing. Some gaps can't be bridged, and readers who want nothing but "transparent prose" and plot-driven stories are going to find very little in this book to please them. Plenty of other books mine that material; it's not what we're after. We've got stories with strong plots and stories with perfectly ordinary sentences constructed in the most familiar ways, but on the whole, no, that's not the sort of story that most excites us.
What I hadn't considered before, but seems obvious to me now, is how much anthologies are sitting ducks for reviewers. Lazy reviewers love them, because they read a few stories and generalize from there. Philosophically-minded reviewers love them, because an anthology is a kind of argument, and the reviewer can then work through the book story by story and see how the argument holds up. (Interfictions has, I think, suffered from this.) I've written such reviews myself, sometimes ponderously so -- o, this form of review so easily becomes ponderous! Occasionally, such a tendency produces a review rich with insights rather than bloviation, but it's rare -- one fine example I'd offer is Alan DeNiro's review of Paraspheres for Rain Taxi.
All of which brings me to Gwyneth Jones's thoughtful, somewhat mixed review of BAF at Strange Horizons. First off, I should say I'm old fashioned and think it's unseemly for writers to respond to reviews, unless they need to correct gross factual errors. The people involved with the work under review slaved away and did the best they could, the reviewer has said his or her thing, de gustibus and all that. But with a venture like BAF, it's interesting to look at how such a book is received in general, and important, I think, to clarify some intentions and goals, since this is the beginning of a series.
What I like about this review is that it is so clearly personal -- this is one person's thoughts on reading through the book. (And she clearly read the whole book.) Some stories worked for her, some didn't. We get a clear idea of the sorts of things Gwyneth Jones likes, and readers can calibrate their own responses accordingly, while also getting a few ideas to think about. There are some assumptions I quite vehemently disagree with (particularly about "The Next Corpse Collector"), and though I may be oversensitive, there seems to be a certain snarkiness about U.S. writers in some of the remarks. Though I know more about the writers than is listed in their bios, I think the accusations of provincialism are absurd for a few reasons, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the writers are U.S. citizens and all of the stories come from publishers based in the U.S. That's how it happened this time. Next time, it'll probably be the same, for the purely practical reason that that's what we currently have the most access to, but in the future ... who knows.
Those are quibbles, though, and on the whole, the review pleased me quite a bit, because it's honest and specific and also says lots of great things about many of the stories. But there's one sentence I can't let go without responding to, because it succinctly and efficiently gets at the heart of what makes some of these stories difficult and even unreadable for some people who encounter them.
Jones writes: "Some pieces, I felt, relied too heavily on description, as if unfamiliar detail is all that the fantastic requires." Obviously, we disagree -- if we thought any story had lots of extraneous description or was just trying to be weird for the sake of being weird, we wouldn't have included it. (That's the de gustibus part of all this.) This response, and some others, have made me wonder what we are seeing in certain of these stories that other readers are not?
It may be that the last clause of Jones's statement is directed at the editors rather than the writers, most of whom probably weren't thinking to themselves, "Hey, I'm going to write a fantasy story today!" The classification is entirely our fault. I will hold back from commenting any more on that, because I want the editors to have the freedom to define "fantasy" however they desire.
But if we take the criticism to be one of technique, then I think it makes an interesting point, and one worth debating. In general, popular/commercial fiction avoids long passages of descriptive exposition, and certain types of literary fiction revel in it. It's difficult to generalize about this sort of thing, because the terms are inexact and exceptions abound, but there are differences of attention and pleasure worth noting, and too often, I think, those differences get judged rather than analyzed.
A few assumptions are hidden within the criticism. I'm going to ignore one, though it's a big one: Are the stories being criticized actually filled with extraneous details and descriptions, or is this a perception caused by something else? And what, exactly, does "description" mean and how is it separate from other elements? It would take an essay and a lot of examples to explore those questions, and I'd be fascinated to read it if someone else wrote it.
The assumption that interests me here is that description has a narrow function. This is the assumption that causes readers to grow impatient with paragraphs and pages they decide are "too descriptive". I am sometimes one of those readers. But, primarily through teaching high school students (who seem to have a genetic disposition to hate anything they can label "description"), I've learned that my knee-jerk reaction against descriptive writing is often shortsighted.
The best fiction, I believe, is fiction in which the sentences do many things at once. Such fiction is rereadable: it reveals more and more with each encounter. If, like me, you tend to make hasty judgments about descriptive passages, I think it's worth trying to break that habit with these stories. What I think you'll find if you suppress your superficial reactions to some of the stories is that their sentences are doing quite a few things at once, particularly the sentences in the descriptive passages.
An analysis of any strong passage of descriptive writing would point out a variety of things. First, there are the rhythmic features of the sentences, the sounds they produce together. Then there are the meanings the words seek to convey: they tell you something happened, they show a character's response to something, they describe an object or a scene. This is where we sometimes stop -- we assume a description, for instance, is just trying to create an image in our mind. As a reader, if I can't figure out what else a passage is doing, and I haven't been particularly entranced by the sound, I move on if a descriptive passage lasts for more than a few sentences, because I've got a good imagination and prefer to have sketches rather than oil paintings cluttering up the attic of my mind.
But description can do more, and, having read all of the stories in the book at least three times, and many of them considerably more than that, I think the tales in BAF all reward careful consideration of what their sentences are up to. In some cases, the descriptions are creating juxtapositions and patterns, building structures of image in your mind, an alternate logic in dialogue with the logic of the story's surface. They create worlds not just by illustrating a universe different from the rational one we take for granted, but by moving beyond denotation to utilize all the tools available -- not just evoking, but summoning and embodying a reality other than the one we inhabit (this, I would argue, is the wonder and pleasure and genius of "The Chinese Boy").
Most of the stories don't go quite that far, but nonetheless their best passages all do more than simply describe something: they allow what is being described to suggest so much more than the fact of itself, and to interact with the other elements of the story in multiple, and often subtle, ways. "The Stolen Father" shows its narrator grappling with loss, grasping at the words to represent all he believes and doesn't believe, all he seeks and aches for, repeating and revising until he can turn his life into a more comforting tale. "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" is a kind of jazz riff on adolescence, a marvelously balanced confabulation of absurdities and unbridled ridiculousness with the yearnings of youth, like a tall tale told to fend off the destructive furies of our passing days. The details in "The Next Corpse Collector" are essential to understanding the narrator and the situation of the story -- nothing in the story would really make sense of it were a minimalist charting of this-then-that, and the vivid, painful, beautiful texture of the tale is essential not merely for its own sake, but for the patterns that reveal the character's lives and motivations. The details are also necessary for the sake of the story's pacing, which helps reveal its world -- the pace of a place is essential to its character.
If we go into a story and look at a passage with the attitude that it is simply a description, then we blind ourselves to what else may be going on there, and in reading and rereading these stories, I believe that each one of them deserves and rewards a more open mind than that.
I am nitpicking a review I am grateful for, mostly because I feel so warmly toward these stories and the book as a whole that I want readers to approach them with the best possible perspective, because the goal of the book is not to cause frustration and angst and repulsion, but rather to share the pleasure we had when we discovered these tales.


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CHICAGO (AP) -- The medical director of three Illinois clinics that used a possibly tainted steroid medication says four patients received follow-up tests for meningitis and all got reassuring results.
Dr. Randolph Chang of APAC Centers for Pain Management told The Associated Press on Monday the patients had spinal taps because they experienced mild symptoms. He says there are still noconfirmed cases of meningitis among the clinics' patients.
Chang says the APAC clinics notified about 150 patients who received back injections of a steroid made by a pharmacy in Massachusetts. Health inspectors found fungus in at least one sealed vial of the steroid at the Massachusetts company's facility last week.
Shipments went to clinics in 23 states, including the three APAC clinics in Illinois. Nationally, more than 100 people have been sickened.

subset: commoncrawl


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- I Went Mac, But Then I Went Back - Part 1
- I Went Mac, But Then I Went Back - Part 2
- I Went Mac, But Then I Went Back - Part 3
The last three posts have been about various features and specs that I have on my new laptop and reasons why I went back to a Windows computer after being a Mac guy for 5 years. Although I love my new laptop and am enjoying all of those features mentioned in previous posts, there are some things that I do miss from my Mac.
- The track pad on my Mac seemed to be a bit more responsive and worked a bit better than my new laptop. My new laptop's track pad sometimes right-clicks when I don't want it to and there are some finger gestures that I had on my Mac that don't work on PCs. Even with those small differences, I mainly use my bluetooth mouse when I am using my laptop, so I don't use the track pad very much anyway.
- I really enjoyed using Apple's Pages program, which is similar to Microsoft Word. I mainly used that program for page-layout documents, which I found to be very easy to make in Pages. I have Adobe Creative Cloud on my new laptop, so I want to learn how to use Adobe In-Design, which is a lot more advanced than Pages but I will also be able to do a lot more with it.
- My new laptop looks like it is made of aluminum, just like my Mac Book Pro, but it is make of painted plastic to look like aluminum. The "feeling" of my old Mac felt more durable and strong than my new laptop. I'm not afraid of my new laptop breaking or anything, I just liked the solid feeling of the aluminum on my old laptop.
- I am a big fan of Apple's power cord. The transformer had two hooks that I could wind up the cord in a nice and organized way. My new laptop's transformer is a bit bigger and the cord doesn't wind up as well. I know, that sounds really picky, but it is something that I do miss from my old laptop.
- Preview - Preview is a program that comes built into every Mac for viewing images, movies and PDFs. I really like this program. I don't know if the preview feature of hitting the spacebar was part of Preview or just something built into Macs. However, I really liked this feature. If I had a list of images I could just hit the spacebar and the image would pop up with a good sized preview of the image. I could just hit my arrow key and it would scroll through each of the images. I have tried to find an alternative for Windows but have not had much success.
- Over the last several years I have written in my journal using an app called One Day. As of right now it is only for Mac and iOS. Their website says that they will one day have an Android app, but no mentions of a Windows based software. I was at least able to export all of my journal posts over the last several years into a rich-text document. One thing I learned from that experience is that I don't want an operating system dependent journal application. I have been looking for an application that works on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, but I have not found one yet. I think the best option would be to just do it online using Google Drive or something, but I haven't found a good way of doing that.
Those few differences that I miss from my old laptop are pretty small and don't make that much of a big deal, except for my journal. I just wanted to do a post where I could at least give some of the good things about my old laptop that I miss and will miss in the future. I am sure as time passes I will find other things that I miss about my Mac, but I will also find other new things I love about Windows or software that is available for my new computer.


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MASNAA, Lebanon (AP) — After a bloody, weeklong siege in the Syrian capital, residents who stayed behind are facing hours-long lines for gasoline and bread, stinking piles of garbage in the streets and scenes of destruction unimaginable in a city that had long been spared the worst ravages of the country's uprising.
It's a gruesome turn for the distinguished Middle Eastern city of Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and a sign that Syria's civil war appears doomed to escalate.
Residents in the hardest hit neighborhoods of Midan, Qaboun and Barzeh picked through the rubble of destroyed homes, charred cars and mangled electricity cables. Even as the government claimed on Monday to have largely put down rebels in the city, some residents fearing more violence continued to trickle into neighboring Lebanon, where thousands fled during the height of the fighting last week.
"I never thought I would see gunmen clashing with the army on the streets of Damascus, people fleeing their homes," said Nahed, a 32-year-old peace activist in Damascus. "It's like Lebanon but in reverse," she said, referring to the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah when thousands of Lebanese poured into Syria, looking for safety.
For a year and a half, residents of the Syrian capital went about their daily business, largely oblivious as President Bashar Assad's forces and rebels laid waste to towns and cities across the country. Restaurants, cafes and night clubs filled up every night with members of a Damascus elite convinced that the regime would keep the fighting away from its heavily guarded seat of power.
So when the "Damascus Volcano" — as anti-regime activists call the unprecedented eruption of rebels in the capital — struck on July 14, many in the city of 1.7 million were unprepared.
The veneer of calm was shattered and the once bustling, tourist-friendly metropolis was transformed into a virtual war zone as government forces unleashed their full might against the insurgents. Helicopter gunships and tanks blasted rebel positions in neighborhoods. Artillery batteries fired down from the mountains overlooking Damascus into the city.
Long lines built up at the border crossing into Lebanon with cars packed with families and their belongings. Some who stayed packed "getaway bags" with passports, diplomas, money and other valuables in case they had to run for their lives.
"I feel very bad leaving Damascus," said a woman from the upscale Mazzeh district, which also saw fighting, after she arrived in a taxi at the Masnaa border crossing Monday. "I was crying the whole night yesterday when I said goodbye to my family."
"I never thought this would happen in Mazzeh," she said quietly. Wearing a shirt and blue jeans, she held her blond, 8-year-old daughter's hand and said she would spend a week in Lebanon until the situation became clearer. She, like others who spoke to The Associated Press, refused to give her name for security reasons.
For days, Damascenes slept and woke up to the crackle of machine-gun fire and thud of explosions. Gray smoke covered parts of the city's skyline. Tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled onto streets as soldiers set up checkpoints, searching people's cars and asking for IDs. Trash piled up as garbage collectors stopped working.
The government virtually sealed the city off from its suburbs in an attempt to keep more rebels from infiltrating. While the heaviest battles were concentrated in specific, rebellious districts, random shootings broke out across Damascus, including firefights near the prime minister's office and only a few hundred meters (yards) from parliament. Residents locked themselves in to their homes. Most shops shut down.
"I haven't gone out in days, it's crazy outside. Everyone is shooting at everyone else and I don't want to die by mistake," a 28-year-old resident of Mayssat, a neighborhood close to the hard hit Rukneddine district, told AP by telephone over the weekend.
Activists say dozens were killed in the days of fighting, though there is still no firm number.
The hardships coincided with the start over the weekend of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslim families typically meet over lavish meals to break their daylong fast and watch seasonal TV soap operas. Instead, they now tune in to satellite stations for news of fighting.
Until last week, Assad had largely succeeded in shielding Damascus from the violence gripping the rest of the country since the uprising against his rule began in March 2011. Activists say more than 19,000 people have died in the crackdown that has since given way to a grueling civil war as rebels got better armed.
There had been occasional violence in the capital, including car bombs and suicide attacks that hit military facilities and regime gunfire on protesters. But the weeklong rebel assault was by far the fiercest and most sustained. Amid the fighting, the rebels also carried out a stunning bombing inside a regime security facility that killed four senior figures involved in directing the crackdown on the uprising.
By Monday, Syrian forces appeared to have regained control of most of the capital as government forces kicked down doors and searched homes for rebels. Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi told a press conference that the security situation was now "much better."
"This is an emergency situation and it will not last more than a day or two and the situation will return to normal," he said.
Government workers and regime supporters sprayed "we love you" on walls in Midan, but graffiti demanding freedom could still be seen in some areas. Dozens of destroyed, burnt out cars, shell-pocked homes and torn, mangled electricity cables were on display, witnesses told AP.
At the normally bustling market in the Shaalan district Monday, people waiting in line for bread got into an argument that illustrated the divisions in the country. One woman accused the rebels of bringing disaster on the country.
"What about the helicopters shelling people in Mazzeh?" someone shouted in reply.
"Everyone who carries a weapon deserves that," came the answer.
"I pray to God that all this will end soon," a third woman said despondently, ending the conversation.
Shops in the battleground districts remained closed. So were the fancy shopping centers in the Kfar Souseh neighborhood, an area neighboring Mazzeh that houses new, high rise buildings and the Foreign Ministry. Only the supermarket at the Sham City Center mall opened for few hours over the weekend, causing a rush of residents trying to snap up short supplies of vegetables, fruits, meat and bread.
"I could not get a loaf of bread or any kind of vegetables," said Lana, a 29-year-old mother of two.
Across the city, long lines formed at gas stations and bakeries.
Hadeel, a 29-year-old marketing manager, ventured out on Monday after days huddled in Mazzeh to try to fill up her car's tank in case she and her family had to flee. But the line was too long. "I couldn't, I didn't want to stay in line for hours," she said.
At the Masnaa border crossing, not everyone was driving into Lebanon.
Majed, a 45-year-old taxi driver from Damascus' Midan district, was heading home, "now that the state has carried out its duties and cleansed" the area.
"The people of Damascus are not used to wars," he said. "There was real fear in Damascus last week."
Karam reported from Beirut.


text:
BIRMINGHAM, Mich. (AP) -- An upscale Detroit suburb's decision to put up a $30,000 artificial Christmas tree outdoors instead of decorating a live tree has attracting some criticism and prompted debate about the holiday tree-trimming tradition.
The 35-foot-tall artificial blue spruce in downtown Birmingham's Shain Park is outfitted with 22,260 multicolor lights on its 298 branches, the Detroit Free Press reported.
In past years, Birmingham decorated a live tree nearby that apparently didn't look good enough.
Decorators "spent a lot of time trying to get that tree to look beautiful. We tried," said John Heiney, director of the city's Principal Shopping District. The live tree has gaping branches, an uneven shape and large bumps on the trunk, and Heiney said: "We used to hear comments, 'Oh, is that the tree?'"
Melissa Vedder, 36, of Birmingham, Mich., said she disliked the idea of an artificial tree.
"I think it's horrible, and it's honestly tacky," Vedder said. "It's going to be outside. Why would you put a fake tree outside? It's just absolutely ridiculous. I hate buying a fake tree to put inside. The kids have allergies; I have to have a fake tree. But outside? A fake one? I can't even imagine."
The state of Michigan, Detroit and some other communities use cut-down live trees for their annual holiday displays. Some other communities don't decorate trees. Birmingham's artificial tree was paid for by the city's Principal Shopping District, the Department of Public Services and a $2,000 donation from a local business.
"They're just so good at making them look so realistic now," Heiney said.
The artificial tree, which stands about 50 yards from the old tree, is to be lit during a ceremony Wednesday night. The city plans to keep the artificial tree for 10 years, and by that time there's hope that another tree in Shain Park will have grown large enough to serve as the city's official tree.
"There are a couple good candidates," Heiney said.


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Disney/Pixar Finding Nemo (GameCube) review
"Finding Nemo alternates between being boring and bad. Lest you conclude simply that I was not the intended target market, consider two things: firstly, the movie managed the enviable task of capturing the attention and imaginations of children and adults alike. And secondly, my young nephew was as bored with the proceedings as I was, turning quickly to his Gameboy Advance to play some of his old games. Kids like new. Finding Nemo's inability to engage cannot be understated."
Staff review by Marc Golding (April 07, 2004)
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At Crytek we offer a great wealth of positions in Programming & Engineering. We are constantly seeking the best and most skilled Engineers from across the globe including:
Even if there are no current openings listed that match your current skills and experience, please keep on the lookout, continue to hone your skills and follow your passion. A position that perfectly fits your talents may be opening up soon!


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Of all the New York Mets' questions entering spring training, perhaps the most intriguing is at catcher, where an inexperienced Travis d'Arnaud is the starter without a veteran mentor.
Last year, he had John Buck. However, when d'Arnaud was injured, the job became Buck's with young Anthony Recker as back-up. By the time d'Arnaud was ready for Citi Field, Buck was heading for Pittsburgh.
The Mets could use Buck back this year as a caddy for d'Arnaud, but manager Terry Collins said he's comfortable with Recker as the back-up. But, it's January, not July and the Mets aren't riding a six-game losing streak and heading to the West Coast.
Truth is the window is small for both d'Arnaud and Recker, and we don't know what either could do with 550 at-bats over a full season. That's a major concern, as is both their abilities to call a game and settle a pitching staff.
Mets pitchers last year had a comfort dealing with Buck they didn't have time to develop with d'Arnaud. Mets pitchers did have some sense of comfort with Recker, who produced more at the plate than d'Arnaud.
Teams have carried weak-hitting catchers before, but usually they had enough offense elsewhere to compensate. This Mets' team doesn't have that luxury.
Of the two, for a young catcher, defense and handling a staff take precedence over offense, but as a young player it is only natural d'Arnaud will fret if he's not hitting.
The problem is the Mets don't know what they have in d'Arnaud, either at the plate or behind it. Ditto for Recker. Those are significant concerns.
Your comments are greatly appreciated and I will attempt to respond. Follow me on Twitter @jdelcos


text:
Law school to host seminar sessions on topic of jury biasUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Law school
Beverly Creamer, (808) 389-5736
Law school
Is there bias in juries in the United States? In recent days, that question has been underscored – especially in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, and even in the context of the ongoing Christopher Deedy trial in Hawai'i.
On Friday, July 19, 2013, the question of bias in juries – especially in relation to juries in East Asia – will be part of a morning mini-seminar at the William S. Richardson School of Law on the campus of UH Mānoa.
The program, "Jury Systems in East Asia and the U.S.," brings together top legal scholars from Hawai'i, Japan and Korea to discuss and debate the role and desirability of jury systems. The program is hosted by the law school's Culture and Jury Project, in collaboration with Seoul National University Law School.
Richardson Law Dean Avi Soifer called the seminar an important example of how legal institutions work together to create greater understanding of a topic of great importance.
"Whatever one thinks about a particular jury decision, the jury system is fascinating," said Dean Soifer. "There is much to be learned as other legal systems have implemented variations on the important ways that juries function in the United States. We anticipate a lively discussion with our colleagues from Korea and Japan, joined by other experts from our legal community."
The program, in Room 254, begins with an 8:30 a.m. welcome by Dean Soifer, and breakfast, followed by two sessions.
Session One, 9-10:20 a.m. Chair Justin Levinson, Richardson Law Professor:
Part 1) Participant: Jae-Hyup Lee, Seoul National University, Korea, speaking about the Korean Jury System and Reflections from the 5-Year Implementation. Discussion by Patrick Border, Judge, First Circuit of Hawai'i, and Richardson Associate Law Professor Tae-Ung Baik.
Part 2) Participant: Syugo Hotta, Meiji University, Japan. Discussion by David Johnson, UH Department of Sociology, and Hirofumi Ito, Aichi Law School, Japan.
Session Two, 10:30 a.m.-12 noon Chair Jisuk Woo, Seoul National University, Korea:
Part 3) Participant: Justin Levinson, Empirical Examinations of Bias in U.S. Juries. Discussion by Mark Davis, Davis Levin Livingston, Honolulu.
Part 4) Roundtable Discussion with Tsun-Chen Kang, Judge, Chiai District Court, Taiwan; and Do Kyun Kim, Seoul National University.
Lunch will be served from 12 noon-1:15 p.m.
For more information, visit: https://www.law.hawaii.edu/


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The Constitution on Trial: The Internment of the Japanese During World War II
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|Wilton, Conn.
|High School:
2011: Lettered as a first-year ... an athletic defenseman with tremendous size and smarts ... already among the top defensemen in the ODAC ... expected to start at close defense again this spring.
2010: Started all 17 games and led the team with 40 caused turnovers in posting Second Team All-ODAC laurels ... notched a goal in a 12-6 win over Randolph-Macon (4/28) in the ODAC Tournament ... also had 26 ground balls for a Generals' defense that ranked 13th in Division III in scoring defense (6.71 GAA) and 12th in Division III in man-down percentage (.821) ... caused six turnovers and collected four ground balls in a 9-5 win over Washington College (3/4) ... had five caused turnovers and scooped up two ground balls in a 7-5 loss to Franklin & Marshall (3/13) ... received the C.W. Pacy Award as the team's top first-year player.
High School: Earned four letters in football and three in lacrosse at Wilton High School …served as a captain of the lacrosse team his final two seasons and was a football team captain as a senior ... earned all-conference honors in both sports as a junior and senior …also garnered all-state laurels in lacrosse his final two seasons ... received the scholar-athlete award for both football and lacrosse and was an All-American in lacrosse following his final season.
Off the Field: Brother, Stephen '11, also attends W&L … uncle, Pete McSherry, played lacrosse at Virginia … serves as a University peer tutor and is a member of the "23" Student-Athlete Group ... undeclared major.


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University Astronomy Tuition in Stockton-on-Tees and Billingham
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Helpful Gardening Tools
Spring has officially arrived, and it's time to check your garden shed to see what tools you have and which ones need to be replaced. Whether you've been gardening for years or are just starting out, here are some gardening tools that will make your tasks a little easier:
Weeding Knife - Small weeds can develop strong, intricate root systems. Weeding knives can help get into tight areas and pull up tough, deep-rooted weeds. Try the TBPN Weeding/Planting Knife, which has a sharp, V-tipped blade to dig into the soil with ease and comfort.
Garden Gloves - You may not think of garden gloves as a tool, but a good pair can save your hands from the cuts and scrapes of constant gardening.
Hand Cultivator - This tool allows you to aerate and cultivate soil in small areas like flower beds and small gardens. Try the TBCV Hand Cultivator to loosen and aerate soil easily.
Bypass Lopper - A lopper allows you to trim shrubs and cut small branches. Bypass loppers will give you a clean cut because of their sharp, curved blades. Troy-Bilt® offers the TBBL Comfort Bypass Lopper that makes powering through larger jobs easier on your arms with the dual-lever transmission, giving you 40 percent more leverage while trimming.
Garden Stool - All that bending, kneeling and stooping can be tough on your body. A garden stool will allow you to sit in a more comfortable position at plant level.
Hauling Cart - Carrying mulch and plants to their new destination in your yard can be a daunting task. Hauling carts can make it easier by allowing you to carry your plants and tools all at once. A garden cart is a convenient carryall big enough to transport all of your garden tools, planting pots or several bushels of leaves.
Watering Can - It seems pretty simple, but a watering can is an essential gardening tool. Look for one that holds the maximum amount of water that is comfortable for you to carry.
Garden Apron - Now that you've got all your gardening tools, you need an easy way to get them to your garden. Aprons with pockets are great for holding your garden tools and keeping you clean while you work in the dirt.


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5 Light Subtle Seamless Patterns
Today's freebie includes 5 light subtle seamless Photoshop patterns. This free download comes complete with the .pat file along with the jpg versions. These seamless pattern work great as website backgrounds or as backgrounds for your print material. Click on the thumbnail below to see full preview image. Enjoy!
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Michael R Koelle, PhD
Associate Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
Departments & Organizations
Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program
Yale Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS): Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics and Structural Biology (BQBS) | Molecular Cell Biology, Genetics and Development | Neuroscience
Office of Cooperative Research
1986 BS, Biology, University of Washington
1986 BS, Math, University of Washington
1992 PhD, Biochemistry, Stanford University
1992-1996 Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT
1996-2001 Assistant Professor, Yale University
2001- Associate Professor, Yale University
Education & Training
|Stanford University (1992)
Honors & Recognition
Dylan Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Natural SciencesYale University (2001)
Leukemia Society ScholarLeukemia and Lymphoma Society (1999, 2004)
Pew ScholarPew Foundation (1997, 2001)
Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Medical FoundationThe Medical Foundation (1995, 1996)
Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral FellowshipHelen Hay Whitney Foundation (1992, 1995)
National Science Foundation Predoctoral FellowshipNational Science Foundation (1986, 1989)
Professional Service
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dept. of MB&B (2006 - 2009) Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dept. of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Yale University
Genetics Beijing, China (2010 - 2010)
Dr. Koelle and Dr. Tian Xu (Yale Genetics Department) will be teaching a graduate level genetics course at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, China, in Spring 2010. We will be working with NIBS faculty to help them implement this course, originally developed at Yale, for...


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bbf Series C Half Height Door Kit by Bush Furniture
35" x 0.8" x 29" - File Drawer(s) - 2 Door(s) - Material: Engineered Wood, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), Wood - Finish: Hansen Cherry, Thermofused Laminate (TFL) - View Complete Details
Product Number: BSHWC24411
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bbf Series C Half Height Door Kit by Bush Furniture - Series C Executive Modular Desking configures in dozens of ways, giving you the ability to maintain a more efficient and private office environment. Combines style, functionality, durability, storage, nonhanded configurability. Durable 1 thick worksurfaces and end panels resist scratches, stains and abrasion. All worksurfaces have dent-resistant and scratch-resistant, 3mm, solid PVC edgebanding. Desktops have wire-management grommets for computer cables, telephone cords, electrical wires. Mobile pedestal rolls underneath any desking shell. Lateral file offers an interlocking drawer mechanism that prevents tipping for added safety. Fabric-covered tackboard standard on all hutches. File drawers feature full-extension, ball-bearing slides, and accommodate letter-size or legal-size files."
- Photo shows single and double bookcases with half-height doors.
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BLAZE is a 1-year-old black and white male. He also lost his home when his family was evicted and is a little overwhelmed by being in a shelter. He is short haired and will be a nice pet when he has a chance to get acclimated. He has lived with Baby and another cat named Prince.
Milford Humane Society
The Milford Humane Society is open for adoptions at 289 West St. (Rte. 140) on Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. and on Thursday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m. Cats are also shown at Petco in Milford on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Additional information about the cats listed can be obtained by calling 508-473-7008. The shelter website is www.milfordhumane.org. All Milford Humane cats have been given rabies and distemper shots, have been spayed or neutered and have been tested for FIV and FeLV.
BLAZE is a 1-year-old black and white male. He also lost his home when his family was evicted and is a little overwhelmed by being in a shelter. He is short haired and will be a nice pet when he has a chance to get acclimated. He has lived with Baby and another cat named Prince.
JAZZIE is a very lovable 10-month-old female. She is a medium haired black sweetheart who loves everybody. She is also FIV positive but in great health. For information about Jazzie or FIV, call the shelter.
MICHI is a a lovely 2-year-old female who was pregnant and left behind when her people moved. Her kids have been placed and now it's her turn. She is a friendly, medium-haired, pastel tortie and gets along with most other cats.
SYDNEY is a spunky little 1-year-old pastel tortie. She is short-haired and will be available after vet clearance.
DIAMOND AND DALY are a 10-year-old brother-and-sister pair. They are declawed and were surrendered when their person became ill. They are black and white and Daly is a little shy. They need to be placed together.
PHOENIX is an older man. He's about 10 years old and hoping to settle into someone's lap for his golden years. He is short-haired and black with a little white locket on his chest.
GOLDIE is a beautiful long-haired, orange-and-white female. She is very friendly and would be great company. She is 8 to 10 years old. Goldie has patiently waited out a 6-month quarantine and has been given a clean bill of health.
TYLAW is a spunky brown tiger. He is short-haired and about 4 years old. He gets along with some other animals.
NOEL is a short-haired calico. She is about 5 years old. She tolerates other cats but would probably prefer to be an only child.
VIOLET AND AMETHYST are a mother/daughter pair. Violet is about 2 years old and Amethyst is a year. They are short-haired torties and are mirror images of each other. They would like to stay together.
ARCHIE AND REGGIE are black-and-white siblings. They are about a year old. They are very nice but a little shy.
JOEY AND JOSEPH are cute white-and-tiger-striped brothers. They are short-haired and about a year old. They are a little shy and would like to stay together in a relatively quiet home. They would be fine with other animals.
Baypath Humane Society
Baypath is on Rafferty Road in Hopkinton. The shelter is open every day from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. All Baypath dogs have been spayed or neutered, wormed, heartworm tested and have age-appropriate shots. They also have a Safewatch microchip and leave the shelter with a no-slip collar. Baypath also has cats available for adoption.The following animals are available for adoption. Further information is available at 508-435-6938 or www.baypathhumane.org.
BELLA is a 1 1/2-year-old Labrador retriever mix. Bella is a beautiful girl who is looking for a home that has active owners. She loves to walk, but needs training and a harness. She is super playful with other dogs.
BRINDI is a 1-year-old female Plott hound mix. She is a typical Plott hound. She is athletic and intelligent, but has a high prey drive so isn't good with cats. She is fine with other dogs of all shapes and sizes, and she is good with kids. She is a lady in the house after some initial snooping, but loves her crate and is content to take a chewy into it for a snooze when the family is away. She may be fine in the house alone after an initial acclimation. And when she is out with the family, she loves to come over for a snuggle without being overbearing. She would be a good dog for an active family as long as she were initially leashed when outside. She has climbed a 5-foot fence at her previous foster's farm. The scents from the woods were just too compelling, but she did come back when called.....eventually. Brindi is very accepting of everyone and meets everyone happily with no reservations. She barks very little. She has a unique sounding bark, which is somewhere between a regular bark and a coon hound.
RUSSELL is a 2-year-old male retriever/great Dane mix. Russell came in VERY thin. We're calling him a Dane cross and are not sure if he will look that "Daney" when he fills out, but does now at certain angles. Russell is a very sweet boy, but clearly starved for attention - as well as food - and he needs training. Russell has a VERY HIGH energy level, but loves to be with people.
REUBEN is a 5-year-old male coonhound mix. Reuben is a mellow adult hound and a beautiful boy who loves to walk. He's definitely a hound who could be strolling along with you one moment, then off on a scent the next, so he would do best on a harness. He doesn't seem to mind other dogs, even a little Chihuahua who tried to go after him. He likes to ride around in the car too.
NIKE is a 4-year-old Patterdale/terrier mix. Nike is a really sweet and happy mutt who is looking for his forever home. He is a little shy at first but will be snuggling with you in no time. A quiet home that can work on socializing would be great for him. Nike does not like little dogs, so he should go to a home with no other animals.
CHIP is an 11-year-old male Chihuahua mix. Poor little Chip is here because his owner lost her home. According to her, he loves milk bones and people food. He would do best in a quiet household with one or two people, but he is not good with little kids. He loves long walks, runs and sitting in your lap. He is potty trained and would make a great addition to a quiet home.
Greyhound Rescue of New England
Dogs are available at Greyhound Rescue of N.E. Inc., Mendon. The shelter can be reached at 508-478-1617.
Purr-fect Cat Shelter
Purr-fect Cat's felines can be viewed for adoption by appointment. The cats have been vaccinated, spayed or neutered and tested for FIV and FeLV. To arrange a time, please leave a message at the shelter message center at 508-533-5855. The shelter Web site is www.purrfectcatshelter.org.
BAXTER is a young adult orange tiger. He was found stray. Baxter is a very friendly cat who enjoys being rubbed and groomed. He is active and playful and would be fine with a feline companion, dog or children. He is short-haired.
MAJOR is a young long-haired, white male with tiger patches. This very handsome cat was rescued by a PCS volunteer who had been feeding him and letting him gain her trust. As it turned out, Major was not a true feral cat but most likely dumped by his family. He is handsome, gentle and loves attention. Grooming time is one of his favorite things. He would make a wonderful companion for a single person or couple. Older children would be fine but please, no other animals.
CAGNEY is an older female tabby kitten with some white. She is a very beautiful girl. Born outside to a domesticated mother cat, Cagney had some very feral ways when first taken in by PCS. After four months and lots of kindness and love, she has started to relax and not be so skittish and is letting the volunteers give her their love. She seems to enjoy being by herself rather than playing with the other kittens in her room. Cagney needs the love and peacefulness of an adult home.
DUSTY is a young adult male. He is gray and white. He was surrendered to the shelter due to the inability to get along with one of the other four cats that were already living in the home. He is starting to adjust to life at the shelter and he hopes to find a quiet adult home soon so that he can show you how sweet and loving he truly is. Dusty enjoys having his beautiful long gray fur brushed while he sits and warms your lap.
MUFFIN is an adult female tortie. She was surrendered to the shelter by her owner, who was moving and couldn't take her. Muffin is truly one of the saddest cats that has ever come into the shelter. Slowly, we are bringing her out of her shell and showering her with hugs, kisses and lots and lots of cuddling. She is a beautiful girl who needs someone who has plenty of time to show her that they love and care about her.
CHELSEA is a young adult, medium-haired tortie. Chelsea and her sister, Margo, were left at the animal control officer's kennel. Poor little Chelsea was in deplorable condition. She was so skinny and flea infested and after her veterinary visit the blood work showed that she was borderline anemic. The fleas had helped themselves to so much of her blood that we kept her in foster for a few extra weeks to build up her system. Now at the shelter and reunited with Margo, she seems happy and curious.
MAYA is a young adult dilute calico. This beautiful little girl, who is just under a year of age, was surrendered to the shelter as a pregnant cat. As sometimes is the case with very young cats, her kittens did not survive. She has a very laid-back personality and seems to be enjoying the safety and security of being indoors. Maya would be a wonderful family cat.
Glenda Hazard is a writer and editor for Gatehouse Media. She is also a volunteer at Milford Humane Society. She can be reached by email at email@example.com or by phone at 508-490-7454.


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When I started blogging, I wrote using a pseudonym.
Not that I was focussing my writing on fundamentalist ramblings or anything to be ashamed of. I just appreciated that being anonymous afforded me the ability to write honestly and without fear of reprisal. I didn't have to worry about friends, family and colleagues reading my innermost thoughts.
However, as you start to become established on the Internet, sometimes pseudonyms don't cut it anymore. People don't trust pseudonyms – why would someone hide behind a mask? And so I launched this site with the intention of having a personal base for people to find me.
Anyway, over the last week or so, I've been asked about this site by family and a colleague in work. Nothing bad, mind you. But for instance, a couple of far flung relatives have mentioned the site to my parents (which I found out about at the weekend). An uncle was able to get in touch through the contact form here. And my colleague in work was relatively impressed with my work on the Northern Ireland Guide.
Again, I'm not too bothered about anybody reading this. It's mostly harmless banter. I still have the odd outlet for anonymous ramblings, don't you worry.
I suppose it's just another subtle reminder that visibility on the Internet comes with responsibilities. Having an Internet presence under your own name means managing your reputation. And thankfully, I haven't seen too many "I Hate Gerard" sites on my travels across the Interweb.
When I spoke to my uncle Brendan last week, he said he didn't browse too deeply because he was worried about parts of the site being private. Nope, I'm happy to share anything that's on this site. I probably won't explore my deepest, darkest thoughts in public, but what you see here is what you get.
Either way, if you're a flesh and blood person and we have some connection, past or present, drop me a line. It's always nice to catch up with folk…


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'Holes' to be shown July 16
The Solutions Center will show the movie Holes at 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 16, at the Fond du Lac Public Library.
The free movie (rated PG) is adapted from the best-selling novel by Louis Sachar. It tells the story of down-on-his-luck Stanley Yelnats (played by Shia LaBeouf), who's sent to Camp Green Lake, where he's thrown into the adventure of his life.
The Solutions Center sponsors a free family movie night every third Tuesday of the month. The series features entertaining films that raise awareness on such topics as empowerment, survival, self-respect and healthy relationships.
No registration required. Refreshments will be served.